Still Escaping Public Displays of Music

High on the long list of "No thanks, I'll pass" is music. Sad, I know, but not more sad than having a dead kid, so here I am. Yes, pretty much all music. Some musicals are okay. Some instrumental music is okay. Yeah, I think that's it. 

I thought I was done running out of shops and restaurants because of the music, but I've now done it twice in the last week, so apparently not. It's just a reminder that grief isn't linear. It ebbs and flows and always will for me. 

At the beginning of the week we had dinner with family on the patio at a local seafood place. It was a beautiful Florida evening. All was well and then this guy settles in with his guitar behind a microphone that I hadn't seen. Honestly I'm generally not a fan of live music at restaurants to begin with because it's always SO LOUD you can't have a conversation. But this guy was singing all the corny, sappy country hits. <Cue eye roll> When he started playing Garth Brooks' The Dance I looked at Ty and said, "Naw, I am not sitting here for this" and got up and went inside to the front of the restaurant until it was over. "I'm glad I didn't know the way it all would end, the way it all would go. My life is better left to chance. I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance" is not pleasant music for me to eat my fresh catch to. Thanks, I'll pass. Mercifully that ended the guy's set.

Tonight I had plans with a friend to try a new to me sushi place that has quite a cult following. We got there early because we had tickets for a behind the scenes museum tour that we needed to get to. When we walked in the Frozen soundtrack was playing LOUDLY and initially I assumed it was being played by the restaurant. I cannot adequately communicate how ridiculously loud it was in this small restaurant with maybe a dozen tables. We were one of two occupied tables in the restaurant and I realized the vocal stylings of Anna of Arendelle were coming from the other table. There was a toddler watching scenes from Frozen on a phone and the sound must have been on maximum. I put my head in my hands and sighed, hearing Anna sing about coronation day practically in my ear. Like pretty much every kid in 2014, Eli watched Frozen over and over and ran around the living room singing the songs. 

We ordered drinks, but it was so loud. I set my jaw to just grin and bear it, but it was impossible to ignore. It was difficult to have a conversation, much less a complete thought. My friend asked if I wanted to leave. Yes! So much yes! So we left a few bucks on the table for our waitress's time and got out of there. I have all the sympathy for appeasing toddlers in restaurants, but also perhaps a little awareness that toddlers aren't the only ones in the restaurant. There's about a 99% chance that phone could have been turned down about halfway and still kept the kid's attention. I'm sure I could have said something nicely, but it was easier to leave. 

It's been the better part of a year or more since music has driven me from an establishment. I thought I was done, but I guess not. I don't know if music will always be too much. Maybe. Maybe not. In the meantime, long live podcasts! 

Coincidence of Grand Proportions

So much of the time I feel as though I am carrying Eli's light alone. It's not exactly true, but as his mom and based on the amount of brain power he takes up every moment, I am sort of the default keeper of his memory. It doesn't help that I'm always -ALWAYS- deciding whether to keep my thoughts about him to myself, even with my own family. It's not anyone's fault, really. The place I live in my mind is sad and the bitterest of bittersweet, and most of the time it feels ill-timed and crazy to talk about all the things that make me think of Eli (pretty much everything, all the time, everyday). It's accurate to say that if we're talking I am also thinking about Eli. Sometimes it's not anything specific, a lot of times it is super specific and of no significance to anyone but me. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. While I do feel crazy at times, I know enough bereaved moms to know that this is just part of After. We pretty much all operate this way.

This weekend the hubs and I went to Charleston. The point of the trip was to go to a specific restaurant with friends and have an amazing dinner, which we did. We also did some sightseeing and exploring. I started keeping track of all the things that reminded me of Eli, but it was literally everything, so I stopped. Right after I decided stop focusing on all the things that made me think of him we drove past a restaurant called Eli's.

The brain is a powerful meaning making machine. In a past version of life I may have seen that as a sign or God-ordained or whatever you want to call it. Now it's just a weird outlier. What are the chances I would pass a restaurant named Eli's in a small tourist town that has a restaurant named Eli's while we're driving around to see some sights? When you frame it that way, not terrible, I suppose. But it can feel like a message or more than coincidence when filtered through our meaning making brains.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me is that I don't find meaning in Eli's death. I staunchly refuse to find meaning in it, actually. There is no meaning or reason in the universe that is worthy of his death, to me. There is no reconciling it. If there's no meaning in the biggest, most painful thing in my life, how can there be meaning in the smaller things? So I actively make space instead of meaning.

We enjoyed quite a magical meal with friends on Saturday night and made plans for brunch downtown the next morning before we all headed home. Sunday morning came and two of our friends had some things come up at home they had to attend to, so they left early. This left us with plans that no longer made sense. The rest of us who were still in town were staying in North Charleston and going downtown would be the wrong direction for heading home after we ate. We looked online at some nearby restaurants and Jerry texted everyone a new, closer place to go. It was well off the beaten path in a more rundown area, but it was nearby and the food looked fantastic. We went and had a relaxed meal of Dutch Baby pancakes, biscuits, grits, chicken fried steak, and the like. When we went up to the counter afterward to pay I wasn't paying attention to the rest of the smallish restaurant. And then one of Eli's nurses from his time in PICU at Duke appeared. She and her husband were having brunch on the other side of the restaurant and saw us come up to the counter to pay our bill. We hugged and talked for a few minutes. It was amazing to see her, and even more amazing that we were both in Charleston for the weekend and happened to go to the same out of the way brunch spot at the same time. I was so shocked I felt like I could hardly get a sentence out. I later messaged her to say how nice it was to see her and to explain how crazy it was that we ended up there. Well, she, too, had plans for brunch somewhere else but ended up at that diner.

Happenstance isn't the right word, but I'm still overwhelmed by our crossed paths. When we left for home I cried in the car for the better part of an hour. Not out of sadness. Out of being overwhelmed, out of the reminder that I'm not the only one who remembers Eli, out of the love, kindness, compassion, care that Leah always had for Eli, and for me, out of the bittersweet connections that make up our humanity, out of the most unlikely of chance meetings ever happening, and the fragility of life, and a million other things there just aren't words for.

Part of me wants to believe it was orchestrated. How could it not be? All of the things that had to go a certain way....it's unfathomable. And yet, I can't make sense of it because I can't make sense of Eli's death. I can either reconcile everything, including Eli's death, or I can reconcile nothing. And I can reconcile nothing.

I know a lot of people attribute certain things to a lost loved one, and say they can feel their person with them. Maybe they really can. Maybe they're making meaning out of things. Either way isn't wrong. The life of After is about survival. But Eli feels gone, light years away from me. I wish I felt him, but I don't. I'm the keeper of his memory.

Maybe it's easy to look at all this and wonder why I just can't believe something, anything, about this chance meeting, which is still the wrong word for it. Would it hurt less if I did? I have no idea.

If you think you know, I hope you don't live long enough to find out that you don't.